Nice to be asked

There is an exceptional piece by Matt Platkin in the New York Times today. It’s about us here in River Walk City. More specifically it’s about this dilemma we have in San Antonio. Not many of us turn out to vote in local elections.

There’s a simple reason for that, writes Platkin, a Stanford University law student who ran City Councilman Rey Saldaña’s successful campaign for office last year. The headline on the oped says it plain: “People don’t vote when no one asks them to.”

In this piece, Platkin confirms what others in GOTV, get out the vote, efforts have told me. That would be that campaigns talk a good game about attracting more voters but what they’re really saying is, let’s look at who voted in the past and get them to vote again — for us.

And that’s not quite the same as finding voters with a whole lot of skin in the game but who nonetheless don’t vote in local elections — why we seem to have a whole lot of turnouts in the single digits.

Platkin, who was running his first campaign at the time, wrote that when he and his candidate checked in with the experts, they were told to find out who voted in the last three elections and then target them. And they were also fed the line that “Latinos don’t vote.”

Platkin, perhaps demonstrating that there is wisdom that non-experts can bring to problems that demand common-sense solutions, instead reasoned that a non-establishment candidate needed new votes outside the pool of likely voters into which everyone else dips.

They knocked on doors and aggressively targeted these unlikely Latino voters in this Latino heavy district. And what they discovered is that Latinos do vote when asked. Saldaña won with enough votes to even avoid a runoff.

Yes, turnout citywide in those May 2011 races was still dismal, about 7 percent, according to news reports. But Platkin is still on to something here.

Campaigns, for understandable reasons, are looking for short-term gain. So, they’re going to try first and hardest for the low-hanging fruit of likely voters. Even in majority Latino districts, there really is no interest in turning unlikely voters into real all-the-time voters. In other words, really no interest in advancing the interests of participatory democracy by turning more of us into participants.

There are people who do that, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project key among them. But others should be in on this effort.

And the problem is not just about local elections. I’ve written of this in the past. There were some 2.3 million Latinos registered to vote in 2010 in Texas. That’s a big number but another one also looms large. That would be the 2.1 million Latinos in Texas eligible to vote but not registered in 2010. In other words, there are nearly as many Latinos who just sit out elections as there are who bother to register — though registration is no guarantee that they will also actually vote. Another issue.

But I wonder how many of these Texans — and not just Latinos — would be registering and voting if someone actually asked. For all the big talk about attracting Latino voters — why Mayor Julián Castro is the keynote speaker today at the Democratic National Convention — I wonder if what they’re really talking about in practice is attracting a large turnout of likely Latino voters.

While this would be a notable accomplishment that might spell the difference between an Obama win or loss, it’s not the same as targeting those unlikely Latino voters. Not necessarily the same as building a sustainable democracy in which everyone who can is asked to participate.